The Network of Excellence in Internet Science (EINS,
www.internet-science.eu) is an EU FP7-funded research project, aiming to
strengthen scientific and technological excellence by developing an
integrated and interdisciplinary scientific understanding of Internet
networks and their co-evolution with society. Its main objective is to
enable an open and productive dialogue between all disciplines which
study Internet systems from any technological or humanistic perspective,
and which in turn are being transformed by continuous advances in
Internet functionality.

Motivation:

A fundamental question arises as how interdependent network systems can
be modeled and designed to support unpredictable disturbance and
unexpected changes when vulnerable to natural disasters, (un)voluntary
disruptions, and malfunctions. Following the "fail-safe" strategy,
sustainability focused traditionally on achieving durability, stability
and practicing effective control of change and growth. Sustainability is
nowadays considered over multiple time and space scales and relies on
(adaptive) resource management processes implementing operational
principles covering, e.g., conservation, diversification, restoration.
Facing unpredictable disturbance and change, can lead to design systems
by adopting instead a "safe-to-fail" strategy, i.e., by anticipating
failures so that system response to perturbations are contained and
minimized. The idea of disturbance away from and return to a stable
state leads to design resilient systems focusing on (maintaining)
efficiency of functions, constancy and predictability. Motivated by the
need to design systems with a single operating objective, engineering
resilience explores system behavior near a known equilibrium state to
accommodate optimal designs. Hence, a system designed to support
resilience still requires robustness -ability of a system to resist
change without adapting its initial (stable) configuration- by means of
decision methods that can produce actionable decisions in the face of
uncertainty while seeking robust rather than optimal decisions. Indeed
robust decision methods provide solution to problems that trade-off
among different risks and multiple objectives when confronted to known
unknowns whereas resiliency mechanisms aim at providing a means to deal
with unknown unknowns.

Workshop Objective:

Understanding the interplay between sustainability, resilience and
robustness becomes thus a critical question in technical system design
as they exhibit many inter-dependencies which are complex to measure and
model but also lead to multi-objective decision problems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Case studies about natural disasters, (un)voluntary disruptions, malfunctions, failures, etc. in (inter-dependent) network infrastructure: what happened and what lead to the situation? - Life cycle analysis of networks: is the use phase most energy consuming or is the production phase underestimated? - Quantifying and evaluating the sustainability of (inter-dependent) networks - Robust optimization of large-scale adaptive networks - Increasing the robustness of (inter- dependent) networks: does it affect the sustainability? - Robust and stochastic (adaptive) control for sustainable network systems design - Energy-aware resilience - Game theoretic and economic aspects of sustainability-vs-resilience trade-offs - Extend robustness analysis towards a rigorous approach to resiliency analysis by e.g. capturing and representing system dynamics at multiple time scale, multiscale models and cross-interactions - Life data analysis in inter-dependent networks: life stat. distributions, parametric and non-parametric methods, life data classification, competing failure modes analysis - Robust optimization of resilient (inter-dependent) networks - Robust decision methods in resilient networks

Abstract Submission:

We invite submission of abstracts of maximum 2 pages (written in
English using single column format, 10pt font, single space, following
the LNCS template) and including i) title, ii) name of authors (and
co-authors), iii) email address, and iv) affiliation.

Abstracts shall be submitted in PDF form only until February 28, 2014.

The submissions will be evaluated by the workshop program committee and
a selection of abstracts will be admitted for presentation at the
workshop. Workshop abstract review notification will be communicated to
the corresponding author by March 7, 2014.

Participants of DRCN do not need to register for participation. Others
can register only for the USRR workshop by selecting the free EINS
JRA7/JRA8 workshop registration option on the DRCN website
<https://drcn2014.paydro.net/>.